The place where the rocks and caves tell the story of how we became humans.
Only humans have evolved to feel deep levels of emotion and express high coefficients of intelligence.
Other sentient beings also show emotions but have not yet been able to talk like humans. Animals speak beyond words.
Humans once spoke beyond words
Imagine a time when language and the written word did not exist.
Today I will be walking where our first humans walked before. I will possibly, unknowingly, be tracing the very same footsteps that some of our ancestors took in their search for food and shelter.
Shelter is what we call home today
Untamed and curious they existed millions of years ago.
The place that tells the story
The place that tells the story is a place where the mountains were formed and shaped by the elements two billion years ago. A place cradled by mountains on the very edge where the savanna and grasslands meet.
The edge of two worlds that provided abundance.
I will be standing on that very place today looking around me in awe.
Still the same sky.
Still the same stars.
It is called the Cradle of Human Kind in South Africa
How we became humans is a library of deep time
One human celebrates his birthday today and it is at birthdays that we celebrate one more year on earth.
I would like to share a poem that celebrates life.
Pioneers and aviators leave footprints on Earth.
He is an aviator. He has lived a layered life navigating through many skies.
Human kind started walking upright on these lands and their bones were found in stones that remembered.
I feel a total sense of reverence for these humans that are our ancestors. It is believed that they even knew how to perform rituals.
How absolutely transcending it is to know that what we take for granted today took millions of years of evolution to achieve.
Celebrating a birthday is a ritual.
A birthday celebration is a ritual that acknowledges that the essence of life is your breath.
If I ever wrote a letter to myself I would say live intensely, love madly and breathe slowly.
In a language beyond words, hold hands.
Library of Deep Time
Tonight we dine beneath an ancient sky,
where the quiet hills hold their breath
and the stones remember.
These valleys are older than memory,
older than language,
older than the first fire lit by human hands.
Here the earth became a library,
its shelves carved from limestone,
its pages written in bone,
its ink the slow patience of time.
Long before cities,
before poems,
before names were given to the stars,
something walked these grasses.
A small figure, upright, curious,
half dream of forest,
half promise of the open plain.
They watched the same sunset
fall across the Magaliesberg,
felt the wind move through the tall savanna,
heard the night creatures begin their music.
They did not know
they were the beginning of us.
Yet beneath these hills
their quiet lives were folded gently into stone,
kept safe in the dark chambers of the earth
until a distant future would come looking.
And we are that future.
We who carry cities in our pockets,
who travel oceans and speak across continents,
still sit tonight where they once walked.
Still breathe the same air.
Still follow the same stars.
Perhaps that is why this place feels sacred—
because time is not lost here.
It is layered.
And if you listen closely,
past the clink of glasses
and the murmur of evening voices,
you may hear it:
the soft turning of a page
in humanity’s oldest book.
The Library of Deep Time.
Transform your home into a place where celebration and memories are created.
Trade Anthology curates objects of beauty that make your shelter feel like home.
TRADE ANTHOLOGY//
Anthology of Trade Secrets
A beyond words celebration of the birthdays of the humans I love.
TRADE ANTHOLOGY 